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AMERICA
  • Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads. It has been woven over many centuries by the patience and sacrifice of count-less liberty-loving men and women. It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of Jew and Gentile, of foreign and native born. Let us not tear it asunder. For no man knows, once it is destroyed, where or when man will find its protective warmth again.
    • WENDELL L. WILLKIE: One World.
  • America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.
    • WOODROW WILSON: Speech, New York City, January 29, 1911.
  • This is the only country in the world which experiences this constant and repeated re-birth. Other countries depend upon the multiplication of their own native people. This country is constantly drinking strength out of new sources by the voluntary association with it of great bodies of strong men and forward-looking women out of other lands. And so by the gift of the free will of in-dependent people it is being constantly renewed from generation to generation by the same process by which it was originally created. It is as if humanity had determined to see to it that this great nation, founded for the benefit of humanity, should not lack for the allegiance of the people of the world.
    • WOODROW WILSON: Address, to American citizens of foreign birth.
  • I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me and I think for all of us not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created-was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying. and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live.
    • THOMAS WOLFE: You Can't Go Home Again, Harper & Bros., 1940.
  • I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.
    • THOMAS WOLFE: You Can't Go Home Again
  • Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night To every man his chance, to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining golden opportunity to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become what-ever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him--this, seeker, is the promise of America.
    • THOMAS WOLFE: You Can't Go Home Again
AMERICAN, AMERICANS
  • The American mind had less respect for money than the European or Asiatic mind shunned, distrusted, disliked, the dangerous attractions of ideals, and stood alone in history for its ignorance of the past.
    • HENRY BROOKS ADAMS: The Education of Henry Adams.
  • They (Americans) must win gold, predominance, power, crush rivals, subdue nature. They have their hearts set on the means and never... think of the end They are eager, restless, positive, because they are superficial. To what end all this stir, noise, greed, struggle?
    • HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL: Journal.
  • There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
    • G. K. CHESTERTON: N.Y. Times, February 1, 1931.
  • Physically Americans were pioneers; in the realm of social and economic institutions, too, their tradition has been one of pioneering. From the beginning, intellectual and spiritual diversity has been as characteristic of America as racial and linguistic diversity. From the beginning Americans have known that there were new worlds to conquer, new truths to be discovered. Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.
    • HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent.
  • There is at least one generation of Americans growing up that not only does not have much respect for diversity of opinion but doesn't know what it is. It is only a step to believing that what is strange or unreported by fifty newspapers is somehow mischievous or "un-American." Once every man reads the same things as his neighbor, and thinks the same thought, the common man is here with a vengeance: that is to say, the mass bigot.
    • ALISTAIR COOKE: The Saturday Review.
  • Closely related to ignorance and inertia, but even more powerful in its influence against complete and impartial truth-telling by newspapers, is fear. Fear is a characteristic not sim-ply of newspapers; it is a characteristic of the American people. It is not a physical fear; Americans have shown courage and endurance times without number. It is rather an intellectual and spiritual fear, based on nothing tangible, on nothing which affords a reasonable basis for fear. It takes most conspicuously the form of fear of and deference to the herd, the whole body of people within the nation.
    • NELSON ANTRIM CRAWFORD: The Ethics of Journalism.
  • He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
    • J. HECTOR ST. JOHN DE CREVECOEUR: Letters from an American Farmer, 1782.
  • The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, ser vile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.--This is an American.
    • J. HECTOR ST. JOHN DE CREVECOEUR: Letters from an American Farmer, 1782.
  • If all that Americans want is security they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads, But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.
    • DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Speech, Galveston, December, 1949.
  • They (the founders) pro-claimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith.
    • DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Address, Columbia University bicentennial dinner, May 31, 1954.
  • The Americans have many virtues, but they have no Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of. We use these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah and Amen. The Americans have no faith. They rely on the power of the dollar, they are deaf to a sentiment. They think you may talk the north wind down as easily as raise society; and no class more faithless than the scholars or intellectual men.
    • RALPH WALDO EMERSON: The Reformer, lecture, Boston, January 25, 1841.
  • For almost a century the modern American reformer has been the gadfly and the con-science, to a large extent the heart and the mind, of the only nation in man's history which has dared to live by the credo that any individual's rendezvous with his destiny is a rendezvous with a better to morrow.
    • ERIC F. GOLDMAN: Rendezvous With Destiny, p. 461, Knopf, 1952.
  • If there is one general judgment that will hold about the American public it is that it is lacking in the fundamental seri-ousness of outlook necessary to the working of a true democra cy, that it is extremely juvenile, not to say infantile, in its attitudes.
    • FERDINAND LUNDBERG
  • The American Animal is nothing but the big Honest Majority, that you might find in any country. He is no politician, he is not a 100% American, he is not any organization, either uplift or downfall ... In fact, all I can find out about him is that he is just normal ... This normal breed is so far in the majority that there is no use to worry about the others. They are a lot of mavericks and strays.
    • WILL ROGERS: Quoted in N. Y. Times.
  • How is it that the American, once he has attained his majority, appears to us as the perfect conformist. It is, perhaps, because he has exhausted during his childhood and adolescence practically all his indiscipline and anarchy, so that he has no difficulty later in life in integrating himself into a collective society, which he himself fully accepts.
    • ANDRÉ SIEGFRIED: America at Mid-Century, Harcourt, 1955.
  • The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow-one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance.
    • HENRY DAVID THOREAU: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849.
  • Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
    • ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy in America.
  • When even one American--who has done nothing wrong--is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.
    • HARRY S TRUMAN: N. Y. Times Magazine.
  • (An Englishman is) a person who does things because they have been done before. (An American is) a person who does things because they haven't been done before.
    • MARK TWAIN
  • Most Americans want to be cultivated, but only comfortably cultivated. They dabble with the intellectual just enough to avoid being lowbrow and escape being highbrow. Middle-browism looks like cultivation because it is so clearly superior to vulgarity, but to be satisfied with it is to make the good the enemy of the best. It merely dresses and domesticates the commonplace.
    • ALAN VALENTINE: The Age of Conformity, Regnery.
  • When honored and decrepit age shall lean against the base of this monument, and troops of ingenuous youth shall be gathered round it, and when the one shall speak to the other of its objects, the purposes of its construction, and the great and glorious events with which it is connected, there shall rise from every youthful breast the ejaculation, "Thank God, I--I also--AM AN AMERICAN!"
    • DANIEL WEBSTER: Address, completion of Bunker Hill Monument, June 17, 1843.
  • The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate--shall I say third-rate?--mind, Karl Marx.
    • H. G. WELLS: Statement to Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, Kyle Crichton, H. and G. Seldes, Bronxville, N. Y., 1935.
  • I shall know but one country. The ends I aim at shall be my country's, my God's, and Truth's. I was born an American; I live an American; I shall die an American.
    • DANIEL WEBSTER: Speech, July 17, 1850.
  • This great American people is at bottom just, virtuous, and hopeful; the roots of its being are in the soil of what is lovely, pure, and of good report, and the need of the hour is just that radicalism that will clear a way for the realization of the aspirations of a sturdy race.
    • WOODROW WILSON: 1912-13 Speeches; The New Freedom, Doubleday & Co., 1913.
AMERICANISM
  • The American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it what you like, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.
    • AL CAPONE: 1929 interview, quoted by Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble, 1956.
  • My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way.
    • AL CAPONE: 1929 interview, quoted by Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble, 1956.
  • For God and Country, we associate ourselves together for the following purposes: To up-hold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America; to maintain law and order; to foster and perpetuate a one hundred per cent Americanism; to preserve the memories and incidents of our associations in the Great War: to inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community, state and nation; to combat the autocracy of both the classes and the masses; to make right the master of might; to pro-mote peace and good will on earth; to safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of justice, freedom and democracy; to consecrate and sanctify our comradeship by our devotion to mutual helpfulness.
    • AMERICAN LEGION: Preamble to its Constitution.
  • If Americanism means any-thing, it means free speech, right from the start. The Pilgrims came to Massachusetts to get it, and Roger Williams left Massachusetts, not only because he had his own religious views but because he attacked prop-erty rights in land not purchased from the Indians. Thomas Jefferson is usually considered a good American, but he said things about the desirability of rebellion that would make us all shudder. Alexander Hamilton argued for free speech here in New York, and James Russell Lowell called the Mexican War murder. The abolitionists, men whom we all honor today, believed in Ameri canism freedom to criticize the government of their day and the institutions of property--the property in Negro slaves. I believe in private property myself, but because I believe in it I want to know why it ought to be supported.
    • ZECHARIAH CHAFEE, JR.
  • A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
    • GROVER CLEVELAND
  • It is a gross perversion not only of the concept of loyalty but of the concept of Americanism to identify it with a particular economic system.
    • HENRY STRELE COMMAGER: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent.
  • With the Sedition and Espionage Acts the "red hysteria" of the Twenties, the Alien Registration Act of 1940, the loyalty tests and purges of the mid-Forties, the establishment of un-American Activities Committees, intolerance received, as it were, the stamp of official approval. Loyalty was identified with conformity, and the American genius, which had been experimental and even rebellious, was required to conform to a pattern.
    • HENRY STRELE COMMAGER: The American Mind, 1950.
  • The American ideal was stated by Emerson in his essay on Politics. "A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered." It does many men little good to stay alive alive and free and proper-tied, if they cannot work.
    • WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS: Dissent, Barsky v. Regents, April 26, 1954.
  • The strongest phases of our new American philosophy are the desire for enormous business, more wealth and less liberty, more despotism and less freedom of education, which al-ways accompanies the absolute rule of the few.
    • THEODORE DREISER: Tragic America.
  • I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
    • RALPH WALDO EMERSON: Self-Reliance.
  • This Was the American Dream: a sanctuary on the earth for individual man: a condition in which he could be free not only of the old established closed-corporation hierarchies of arbitrary power which had oppressed him as a masa, but free of that mass in to which the hierarchies of church and state had compressed and held him individually thralled and individually impotent.
    • WILLIAM FAULKNER: On Privacy, Harper's Magazine, July, 1955.
  • O, let my land be a land where Liberty
    Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
    But opportunity is real, and life is free,
    Equality is in the air we breathe.
    (There's never been equality for me,
    Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
    • LANGSTON HUGHES: Let America Be America Again.
  • I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
    I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars,
    I am the Red man driven from the land,
    I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
    And finding only the same old stupid plan
    Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
    • LANGSTON HUGHES: Let America Be America Again.
  • O, yes,
    I say it plain,
    America never was America to me.
    And yet I swear this oath--
    America will be!
    • LANGSTON HUGHES: Let America Be America Again.
  • To control the American market is to own America.
    • ROBERT M. LA FOLLETTE, Sr.: Fooling the People as a Fine Art. La Follette's Magazine, April, 1918.
  • American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most is-norant part of society. In En-gland there is plenty of grum-bling in bad years, and some-times a little rioting, but it matters little, for here the suf-ferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a select class, deeply inter-ested in the security of property and the maintenance of order.
    Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly restrained. The bad time is got over without rob-bing the wealthy to relieve the indigent.
    • THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY: Quoted by F. D. Roosevelt, August, 1937.
  • That the people have an original right to establish for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis in which the whole American fab-ric has been erected.
    • JOHN MARSHALL: Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 1803.
  • The Working Men of Europe feel sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the Middle Class, so the American Anti-Slavery War will do for the Working Classes. They con-sider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded Son of the Working Class, to lead his Country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of the enchained Race and the Reconstruction of a Social World.
    • KARL MARX: Letter to Lincoln, November 29, 1865.
  • We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people the Israel of our time we bear the ark of liberties of the world.
    • HERMAN MELVILLE: White Jacket.
  • We are the pioneers of the world; the advance guard sent on through the wilderness of untried things to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom.
    • HERMAN MELVILLE: White Jacket.
  • We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason, is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.
    • EUGENE O'NEILL: Give Me Liberty and... (unpublished play).
  • Americanism is a question of principle, of purpose, of Ideal ism. of Character; it is not a matter of birthplace or creed or line of descent.
    • THEODORE ROOSEVELT: Address, Washington, D. C., 1909.
  • There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.
    • THEODORE ROOSEVELT: 1915.
  • Everything is un-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy or government by a mob.
    • THEODORE ROOSEVELT: 1917; Hagedorn.
  • To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.
    • THEODORE ROOSEVELT: 1917; Hagedorn.
  • All privileges based on wealth, and all enmity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American.
    • THEODORE ROOSEVELT: 1917; Hagedorn.
  • If I were asked to name the three influences which I thought were most dangerous to the perpetuity of American institutions, I should name corruption, in business and politics alike; lawless violence; and mendacity, especially used in connection with slander.
    We Americans are children of the crucible.
    Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity and hardihood--the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
    • THEODORE ROOSEVELT: Time, March 3, 1958 (100th anniversary).

Miscellaneous

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C. FitzSimons Allison

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  • Whan Costantyn of curteysye holykirke dowed
    With londes and ledes lordeshipes and rentes,
    An angel men herde an heigh at Rome crye,
    "Dos ecclesie this day hath ydronke venym,
    And tho that han Petres powere arn apoysoned alle."
    • When Constantine out of generosity endowed the Church
      With lands and subjects, estates and rents,
      Men heard an angel cry high above Rome,
      "This day the true wealth of the Church has drunk venom
      And those who have Peter's power are all poisoned."
    • William Langland, Piers Plowman, bk. 15, ll. 519–23
    • Pietro Cali, Allegory and Vision in Dante and Langland (Cork UP, 1971), p. 150

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Colonial history of the United States

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  •    Behold! they come—those sainted forms,
       Unshaken through the strife of storms;
       Heaven's winter cloud hangs coldly down,
       And earth puts on its rudest frown;
       But colder, ruder was the hand,
       That drove them from their own fair land,
    Their own fair land—refinement's chosen seat,
    Art's trophied dwelling, learning's green retreat;
    By valour guarded, and by victory crowned,
    For all, but gentle charity, renowned.
       With streaming eye, yet steadfast heart,
       Even from that land they dared to part,
          And burst each tender tie;
       Haunts, where their sunny youth was passed,
       Homes, where they fondly hoped at last
          In peaceful age to die;
       Friends, kindred, comfort, all they spurned—
          Their fathers' hallowed graves;
       And to a world of darkness turned,
          Beyond a world of waves.
  • Our fathers have been ridiculed as an uncouth and uncourtly generation. And truly, it must be admitted that they were not as expert in the graces of dress, and the etiquette of the drawing-room, as some of their descendants. But neither could these have felled the trees, nor guided the plough, nor spread the sail which they did; nor braved the dangers of Indian warfare, nor displayed the wisdom in counsel which our fathers displayed. And had none stepped upon the Plymouth rock but such effeminate critics as these, the poor natives never would have mourned the wilderness lost, but would have brushed them from the land as they would brush the puny insect from their face; the Pequods would have slept in safety that night which was their last, and no intrepid Mason had hung upon their rear, and driven into exile the panic-struck fugitives.

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  • Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up. ~ Oscar Wilde
  • It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners. ~ Oscar Wilde
  • Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. ~ Oscar Wilde
  • It is only in the upper-class level that each husband sits next to the other man’s wife. ~ Louis Kronenberger
  • The United States never lost a war or won a conference. ~ Will Rogers
  • No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. ~ H L Mencken
  • America is a young country with an old mentality. ~ George Santayana
  • Some Americans need hyphens in their name because only part of them has come over. ~ Woodrow Wilson
  • The French look exactly like French, the faces of Dutchmen are Dutch, Danes look like Danes and Egyptians look very Canalish. Americans have a sad countenance. They probably look like this because they developed catarrh when they landed on Plymouth Rock. ~ Sir Alfred Richardson
  • The Americans, like the English probably make love worse than any other race. ~ Walt Whitman
  • The 100 percent American is 99 percent an idiot. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Anonymous

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  • The silver swan, who living had no note,
    When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
    Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
    Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
    Farewell, all joys; O death, come close mine eyes;
    More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.
  • Add more anonymous English lyrics...
  • Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live on in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
  • If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
    • Harry S. Truman, White House Press Release Announcing the Bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945); this announcement was based largely on a draft of July 31, by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
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Politics of the United States
  • Alien, n. An American sovereign in his probationary state.
  • Alligator, n. The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World. Herodotus says the Indus is, with one exception, the only river that produces crocodiles, but they appear to have gone West and grown up with the other rivers.
  • Consul, n. In American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.
  • Dejeuner, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.
  • Delegation, n. In American politics, an article of merchandise that comes in sets.
  • Dullard, n. Since a detachment of Dullards came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower and made a favorable report of the country, their increase by birth, immigration, and conversion has been rapid and steady. According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians. The intellectual centre of the race is somewhere about Peoria, Illinois, but the New England Dullard is the most shockingly moral.
  • Finance, n. The pronunciation of this word with the i long and the accent on the first syllable is one of America's most precious discoveries and possessions.
  • Grapeshot, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.
  • Hangman, n. An officer of the law charged with duties of the highest dignity and utmost gravity, and held in hereditary disesteem by a populace having a criminal ancestry. In some of the American States his functions are now performed by an electrician, as in New Jersey, where executions by electricity have recently been ordered—the first instance known to this lexicographer of anybody questioning the expediency of hanging Jerseymen.
  • Introduction, n. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission. The Declaration of Independence should have read thus:
    We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the liberty to introduce persons to one another without first ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and the pursuit of another's happiness with a running pack of strangers.
  • Lord, n. In American society, an English tourist above the state of a costermonger, as, lord 'Aberdasher, Lord Hartisan and so forth. The traveling Briton of lesser degree is addressed as "Sir," as, Sir 'Arry Donkiboi, or 'Amstead 'Eath.
  • Mustang, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
  • Negro, n. The pièce de résistance in the American political problem. Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to build their equation thus: "Let n = the white man." This, however, appears to give an unsatisfactory solution.
  • Pickaninny, n. The young of the Procyanthropos, or Americanus dominans. It is small, black and charged with political fatalities.
  • Presidency, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
  • President, n. The leading figure in a small group of men of whom—and of whom only—it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.
  • Red-skin, n. A North American Indian, whose skin is not red—at least not on the outside.
  • Ramshackle, adj. Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.
  • Rear, n. In American military matters, that exposed part of the army that is nearest to Congress.
  • Recount, n. In American politics, another throw of the dice, accorded to the player against whom they are loaded.
  • Resplendent, adj. Like a simple American citizen beduking himself in his lodge, or affirming his consequence in the Scheme of Things as an elemental unit of a parade.
  • Revolution, n. Specifically, in American history, the substitution of the rule of an Administration for that of a Ministry, whereby the welfare and happiness of the people were advanced a full half-inch.
  • Rostrum, n. In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.
  • Sheriff, n. In America the chief executive officer of a county, whose most characteristic duties, in some of the Western and Southern States, are the catching and hanging of rogues.
  • Trust, n. In American politics, a large corporation composed in greater part of thrifty working men, widows of small means, orphans in the care of guardians and the courts, with many similar malefactors and public enemies.
  • Un-American, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.
  • Wit, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
  • Yankee, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See Damnyank)
  • Zeus, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.
Women in the United States
  • Limb, n. The branch of a tree or the leg of an American woman.
  • Mustang, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
  • Woman, n. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (felis pugnans).
  • The stockings in holes, the worn-out shoes, the lace in rags, the straggling hair, the sad masks, the notched plates—all made a picture of sumptuous misery hard to be described.
    • Giacomo Casanova, Mémoires (tr. 1894, vol. 4, p. 282
    • Cf. John W. Gardner, No Easy Victories, ed. Helen Rowan (1968), p. 57:
      More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.
    • LOOK FOR SOURCE OF THE PHRASE "SUMPTUOUS MISERY"
  • Mark ruffian Violence, distain'd with crimes,
    Rousing elate in these degenerate times;
    View unsuspecting Innocence a prey,
    As guileful Fraud points out the erring way;
    With subtle Litigation's pliant tongue
    The life-blood equal sucks of Right and Wrong;
    Hark, injured Want recounts the unlisten'd tale,
    And much-wrong'd Misery pours the unpitied wail.
    • Robert Burns, "On the Death of Robert Dundas, Esq., of Arniston", in Alan Cunningham (ed.) Works, with His Life, new ed. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1834), vol. 2, p. 20 [1]
 
It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David. ~ Michelangelo
  • ... a peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiæ, loosely tied...
  • I am the worm who never turned,
       The eunuch without a harem;
    Between the priest and the commissar
       I walk like Eugene Aram.
  • Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Women
  • Women can’t forgive failure.
More work needed
  • L’extension des priviléges des femmes est le principe gènèral de tous progrés sociaux.
  • His sayings are generally like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript.
  • The fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be called ambiguous or not, is that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once. To take a famous example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety of feeling, in
         Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,
    but the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, becauce they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

United States

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  • We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
  • [W]hence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia... could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.
  • In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, ... [w]hen I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.
  • No day ever dawns for the slave, nor is it looked for. For the slave it is all night — all night forever.
    • A freed black man
  • I'd ruther be dead than be a nigger on one of these big plantations.
    • A white Mississippian
  • You know what I’d rather do? If I thought… had any idea that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away! Because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog! Night never come without you had nothing to do. Time to cut tobacco... if they want you to cut all night long out in the field you cut. And if they want you to hang all night long, you hang…hang tobacco. It didn’t matter about your tired…being tired. You’re afraid to say you’re tired. They just... well...
    • Fountain Hughes [2]
  • There was never a moment during this time when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was, owing to the invention of the cotton gin, more than half awake at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; and slavery was continued in the Louisiana Territory by the terms of the treaty. Thereafter slavery was always in everyone's mind, though not always on his tongue.
    • John Jay Chapman [3]
  • South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.
    • James L. Petigru
  • The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers. We have never been a nation. We are only an aggregate of states, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock.
    • George Templeton Strong
  • O dearer than the daylight to thy sister, wilt thou waste, sad and alone, all thy length of youth, and know not the sweetness of motherhood, nor love’s bounty? Deemest thou the ashes care for that, or the ghost within the tomb?

History of Australia

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  • Namaaraalee is highest, he made it all,
    We must keep those ways he pointed out.
  • At its own Wunger place
    A spirit waits for birth.
    • Recounted by Sam Woolagoodjah, elder of the Worrorra people of the Kimberley. Tr. Andrew Huntley from the prose version of Michael Silverstein. Reported in The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986), p. 1
  • Generally young, shallow-brained fellows, proud of their uniform, treating the diggers overbearingly, and bringing down invectives upon the Government through its servants.
    • Mrs Andrew Campbell, wife of the Ballarat police magistrate; Lawrence L. Sharkey, Australia Marches On (Sydney: New South Wales Legal Rights Committee, 1942), p. 282
  • But with all its golden advantages, Australia has yet greater for the emigrant who prefers the comforts and decencies of life to bartering his soul for gold. In Australia, as elsewhere, Mammon carries his curse with him, and his worshippers must partake of it. Drunkenness, debauchery, crime, and immorality, in every shape, are the characteristics of such a society as is now gathering in the gold districts. There are thousands of respectable families in England whose interest it would be to emigrate, but who would not encounter such a condition for all the gold Australia contains.
    • George Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge, 1853), p. 2
  • Thank God there is some prospect of a cessation of the cursed gold seeking for some time owing to the creeks becoming dry. The rascals can’t wash [gold] without water ... It is really ludicrous to see the feeling of indifference (not to say contempt) with which everything appertaining to squatters or squatting is now treated in Melbourne ... They will not always remain under a cloud. The profits of labor will be equalized in time while we have a monopoly of the land which with the help of God we will keep in spite of the Melbourne gold worshippers. Our time will come yet, land will tell in the long run. No one can blame us using any powers circumstances may place within our reach. We are the victims at present, let us hope we shall be the sacrificers by & bye.
    • Squatter William Forlonge to C. Barnes (late 1851); W. Forlonge to C. Barnes, 30 December 1851, pp. 3-4, SLV, MS Box 111/5: reported in Peter FitzSimons, Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution (2012), ch. 4, epigraph
  • [Outsiders] cannot imagine the state of things here. Men who have been servants all their lives are now, after a few weeks work at the diggings, independent.
    • Victorian squatter Alfred Burchett (January 1852); Gregory Blake, To Pierce the Tyrant’s Heart (Loftus: Australian Military History Publications, 2009), p. 12
  • All aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated ... It is not what you were, but what you are that is the criterion.
    • John Sherer, an English digger; The Gold-Finder of Australia: How He Went, How He Fared, and How He Made his Fortune (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co., 1853), p. 10
  • It is every man’s business to take care of himself here. They are just as independent in their speech as in their actions. It is a wonderful place to take the conceit out of men who expect much deference. The Governor was yesterday riding along among this crew, attended by one soldier; but not the slightest notice was taken of him, not even by a touch of the hat. They are just as free in helping themselves to your property.
    • William Howitt, describing Melbourne in 1852; Land, Labour, and Gold, or Two Years in Victoria with Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1855), p. 25
  • Rossinhol en son repaire
    M' iras ma dona vezer;
    E ill diguas lo mieu afaire, ...
    • Go, nightingale, and find the beauty I adore;
      My heart to her outpour:
         Bid her each feeling tell,
         And bid her charge thee well,
      To say that she forgets me not.
    • Ascribed to Dalfi d'Alvernha in M. Raynouard, Choix des poésies originales des troubadours, vol. 5 (1820), p. 292. Versified from Sainte-Palaye Millot French prose translation and ascribed to Peire d'Alvernhe in Edgar Taylor, Lays of the Minnesingers (1825), p. 243
  • Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde,
    Stuck on with Art on either Side,
    Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,
    Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.
  • Moe: Listen, Bustoff, you can't drink that! That's alcohol.
    Bustoff: No, that's not alcohol. That's just a little tequila, vodka, and cognac.
    Curly: Oh, that's different. Go ahead!
  • On sleds reclin’d, the furry Russian sits;
    And, by his rain-deer drawn, behind him throws
    A shining kingdom in a winter’s day.
  • They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and interminable.
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